1F25 Post 2: The Media We Get

                 The media is a tool used to convey societies values,  as well as views, and  the world that we live in. While people may feel that the media that is presented to us is a reflection of what we want to see, I feel like it is really what the provider wants us to see. The saving grace with this is that we still have to option of what we pay attention to what we want in the media that is presented to us, this gives us the illusion that we get the media that we want.

Of course in Western culture we do have it rather easy when it comes to what media is given to us as we have a wide variety of content that isn't heavily censored and anything deemed inappropriate for people has a viewer discretion or some sort of "adult content" warning on it. Of course in certain countries this is not always the case, for example in China where there are strict censorship laws which limits the content that it's people can see, this became problematic for search engine powerhouse Google who was not able to display anything that the government deemed to be sensitive.  Google ended up refusing to comply with China's laws in 2010 and ended up exiting China altogether, information that I learned from O'Shaughnessy and Stadler's textbook (Page 7).

This also applies in regards to the media that is distributed as entertainment, while I know this may be considered inappropriate I'm going to be focusing specifically on pornography, and not typical but gay pornography. In the gay porn industry the major producers are all very similar in regards to what they deliver and that is for the majority is hairless muscle men with ridiculously large penises, most of these "actors" being white or latino. Now while there is a cry for more diversity in gay porn there hasn't been any, and this is probably due to the fact that the models they use make them lots of money already and like what O'Shaughnessy and Stadler stated "distributors of pornography are not really interested in making their audience happy and sexually fulfilled; they want to make money." (Page 8). This could probably also apply just regular TV shows as well, I mean generally a new TV series isn't based off of user demands but off a concept that they believe will make them money, once it stops so does the series which also pays into the idea that we get the media we want, as opposed to the reality of what we get.

CPCF 1F25 Blog Response: Media Impact on Others

Upon reading posts from some of my colleagues and it goes without saying that we definitely agree that the mass media has impacted on views of the world, and how this affects us in our everyday lives. When comparing to my own post I noticed that I had a very two sided view, upon reading some other I feel like many of my colleagues had pretty negative views on the media without looking at some of the lighter elements of it.




In Veronica Field's (http://veronicatmeow.blogspot.ca/) post I noticed that she too felt that the mass media had affected her from a very young age, especially in regards to body image where she says " I'm too tall to be a runway model, too thick to wear the cute dress that Zooey Deschannel wore on the cover of Cosmo a few weeks back, and that my skin is too pallid to even bother trying to put cover-up on every day". She also has the struggle that many of us deal with based on the media's perception of what beauty is. I also felt her post to be something that I could relate with as well since we both seemed to have a knack for Sailor Moon




In Ryan Mallat's post (http://ryanmallat.wordpress.com/) he talks about how he views the media as a vessel of persuasion which I find he uses the best example of when President Obama was running for election where he goes to say " all the news stations could talk about was how great Obama was, how he was a great leader, and charismatic. " I feel like media definitely did help out with Obama's campaign as he used media extensively and in the end result he did en up winning.




While reading Kevin Shen's post (http://kevinshen94.wordpress.com/) he talks about how the media kind of instills this notion that only new things are "cool" and that anything other than that isn't and somehow irrelevant. My favourite example is when he talks about Apple products and how people feel that the new product is a must have, he goes to say "the new iPhone 5c, it is exactly the same as the iPhone 5, but it comes in many different color instead of the standard black and white. A phone having color is nice, but is it really worth it to spend a few hundred dollars for a paint job?". I feel that Kevin is spot on with this one, there really isn't a need to keep upgrading every time something new comes out. I myself still have the iPhone 4S.




All in all I feel like my colleagues and I few the media in similar ways but we do not all view it the same way, as I learned many of my colleagues had a lot of negative things to say about the media. I myself still feel that the media affects us negatively, but I still think that the media provides a lot of positive things for us as well.